Windmill tilters have always been among my favorite people, and I write about them every time I get the chance.
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One of my favorite columns was written in 2006 about a sterling specimen of the breed named Maryann Cottrell, a Glassboro, N.J., woman many local officials considered a real pain in the patootie.
Cottrell, who is handicapped, finally had enough of people without handicaps parking in parking spaces reserved for those with disabilities, and watching the police do nothing, so she took matters into her own hands.
After learning that under state law regular citizens can issue citations for said violations and the police have to issue a ticket for those citizen citations, she started writing up miscreants like crazy.
At the time I wrote about her, she had issued nearly 300 complaints, somany that at one point they had to call a special court session to handle 200 complaints brought by the lady. And in her crusade, she’d caught local dignitaries, lots of neighbors, mail trucks and two members of the Philadelphia Eagles, Donovan McNabb and Jeremiah Trotter.
I’m frankly a little in awe of people like her, and I think that former Glen Ridge Mayor Carl Bergmanson, who calls himself a Whig, is another windmill tilter who bears watching.
Bergmanson, like a lot of other people in this state, has had it right up to the gullet with Gov. Jon Corzine and his antics. And he’s particularly torqued about the governor’s recent budget proposal that would cut state aid to small towns like Glen Ridge dramatically.
In the Greater Media coverage area, there are a lot of towns like Glen Ridge that stand to lose much, if not all of their state aid in the next year. Towns with populations under 5,000 will be particularly hard hit and may lose all the state aid they’ve depended upon for years.
Jamesburg, for example, is looking at a $300,000 cut. Milltown, which is under 10,000, will go from $671,000 to $410,000, the equivalent of 5½ cents on the tax rate. Helmetta stands to lose $136,000. That means higher local taxes in those communities, although increases to educational aid fromthe statemay offset the size of the hikes a bit.
Unlike a lot of others who have been content to grumble about the governor and make rude gestures whenever they see him on television or in the newspapers, Bergmanson decided to do something about it.
Bergmanson filed a petition with the state attorney general and on March 31, was slated to go live with his Web site, http://www.recallcorzinenow.com.
On that site, you can download a copy of a petition to recall our supremely ineffective governor. After you download the petition, you have to get it notarized and mail it to the address Bergmanson lists on his Web site. The petitions have to be mailed back by June 30, 2008.
He hopes to get enough petitions to force a recall vote, although even he admits that getting 1.3 million valid signatures ain’t gonna be a walk in the garden.
Even so, it might be fun to poke a stick under the governor’s blanket, just to let him know we’re out here, and – as the Queen of England might say – we are not pleased. Mark Twain once noted that everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
That’s why I’d encourage you to download this petition, get it notarized and send it in. Even if this goes nowhere, at least it gives those of us who have been grousing a chance to take some action.
And who knows, there might be 1.3 million windmill tilters in New Jersey who have just been waiting for the right opportunity to take up the lance.
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In my home community of East Brunswick, the local poobahs are allegedly looking under every nook and cranny to find ways of cutting the budget so residents won’t face such a huge tax increase for the coming year.
According to a story in the Sentinel, the Greater Media publication that covers East Brunswick, the $64.2 million municipal budget, which is up 1.84 percent from last year,was proposed with an 11-cent increase in themunicipal tax rate, but state aid cuts recently announced could bring that increase to 14 cents.
An 11-cent increase would have the owner of property assessed at $100,000 paying $110 more per year in municipal taxes this year; at 14 cents that property owner would pay $140 more. Municipal taxes are one portion of the property tax bill, which also includes school, county, fire district and open space taxes.
Enter David Stahl, who’s admittedly running against incumbent Mayor William Neary in the primary, but put forth some amazingly common sense ideas anyway.
One would be consolidating a couple of secretarial positions, but the one I really liked was to get the town out of the newspaper business.
Regular readers will remember that when East Brunswick first went into the newspaper business in August 2005, underwriting the cost of printing a good-news schmata called The East Brunswick Quarterly, I wrote a column suggesting it was a dumb idea.
I noted a host of reasons for that opinion, among them the fact that the community would likely lose money in the proposition, although everyone who supported the plan assured us the paper would become self-supporting in no time at all.
As the kids say, "Not!"
They lost between $8,000 and $10,000 on the first issue, and that trend apparently continued. Last year, the community ended up underwriting the cost of the publication to the tune of $25,000.
Neary apparently thinks the investment is a good one because it helps get information out to residents.
Stahl, however, argues that if the administration in East Brunswick is truly looking to cut unnecessary costs, one of the first things on the block ought to be this newspaper.
I couldn’t agree more. The taxpayers of East Brunswick bear an almost impossibly heavy tax burden, and to ask them to continue bearing the cost of a newspaper that loses money is ridiculous. They could save that money simply by posting "important information" on the municipal Web site. Not only would that save money, it would cut down on recycling.
Talk about a win-win proposition!
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. To comment on this opinion, you can write him at [email protected].